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Kuji’s Krazy Log II | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 9 of 706 24 August 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, I'm kind of an oddball. Seriously, who enjoys reading non-fiction but me? That's not to say that I won't read fiction. Last year I read a book called Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. Great book. I'm just very, very picky about what I read. I can't just grab a book and read it. I need to know what it is about first, and whether or not it's of any interest. When I go to Amazon, they don't give you enough detail about what's in the book. They just give the industry-standard publisher's "tease". That's not good enough for me. I bought Netherland because it was reviewed in a lot of places, and there was a cricket element to the plot, so that appealed to my sports-loving self. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson was reviewed in a lot of places, too, but I'm not really into crime novels, so I didn't buy it. In both cases, there was sufficient information for me to decide whether or not to buy it, but unfortunately that is not the case with a lot of fiction. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 10 of 706 24 August 2012 at 8:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Iversen reads fiction exclusively, as far as I know. I like it too, depending on the subject, but I suppose I read more fiction than non-fiction at the moment.
I also prefer to know I will like a book before starting out. It's really difficult to figure out what to read in a foreign language when you don't know what is out there and what's good. I certainly struggled with that sort of thing. That's why I intend to help others and review everything I read. I do like mysteries though. And one great thing about them is that the authors often write a lot of them and frequently even have a series with the same detective in all the books. Series novels can be nice, especially in a foreign language because you don't need to struggle as much to figure out who the main characters are and how the book is put together. Also, if you like the first book, you are very likely to like the others. As soon as I'm done with Harry Potter 6, I'm going to start a few other books I have. I'm looking forward to being able to read something I've never read before and that is written originally in Japanese. I'd been hoping to be able to give some reviews before now, but it probably won't happen until mid-September. Reading HP is taking more time and effort than I'd anticipated. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 11 of 706 27 August 2012 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Brun Ugle - I look forward to your reviews. Maybe they can convince me to read HP. :)
***** KUJI'S WEEK IN REVIEW: 19-25 August 2012 JAPANESE This past week I... * did Anki reviews six out of seven days. * did a few grammar exercises out of IAIJ * watched Japanese TV off and on * started browsing through the sports and entertainment sections of yahoo.co.jp for reading material. I read a few articles, too. * listened to a JapanesePod101.com podcast and reviewed it throughout the week This looks like a lot, but overall I'm disappointed with my week. I should have finished Chapter 4 of IAIJ this week, but I still have some exercises left to do. I also need to make a bigger effort to watch dramas on TV, as well as find ways to extract new vocabulary from them. PORTUGUESE This past week I... * did Lesson 1 of the DLI Portuguese Basic Course. I learned things like the verb ser and greetings (Como vai? Muito prazer. Igualmente.) * listened to radio from Brazil, Portugal, Angola and Mozambique. Also watched live TV from Portugal's national broadcaster, RTP. (I can't believe they offer that on their webpage! Too bad none of the Brazilian broadcasters, aside from TV Brasil, do the same.) * on Saturday, discovered a Brazilian rapper named Marcelo D2 on YouTube and spent a considerable amount of time watching music videos. This guy is amazing! He mixes two types of music I like: American-style 90s hip-hop and samba. I might have to go to amazon.co.jp and buy a CD or two. (On a related note, I'm still looking for an internet radio station that plays samba. I keep finding sertanejo and MPB stations.) I like the DLI dialog exercises, especially the ones where I pretend to be one speaker and the "tape" is the other speaker. On the other hand, I find the pattern drills quite boring. Perhaps it's because the Lesson 1 drills are too simple. (Sou americano. brasileiro > Sou brasileiro. aluno > Sou aluno.) Another problem is finding time to get away from everybody so I can speak out loud and do these drills properly. But I usually have to do it quietly and murmur, like I do with my Anki drills. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 12 of 706 27 August 2012 at 8:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As far as HP goes, the story is the same in Japanese as in English, so if you don't like it in English, you won't like it in Japanese. One weird thing about the Japanese is that the translator keeps all the English names for things, though sometimes giving them in kanji with the pronunciation next to it. I think many of the translators for other languages do a better job at this since they give them new names using their own languages in a way to preserve the puns that Rowling uses so often. So her cleverness with words is often lost in Japanese.
One advantage I've found with reading HP, is that it is easy to keep the English edition beside you when you read, so if you get confused, you can read a little of that, then reread the Japanese to see where you went wrong and how the Japanese express that thought. Also, you can have a peek even when you do understand to get a more precise connotation of a word. This means a lot less dictionary work. Another advantage is that there are a lot of kanji and many of them have furigana. Most books for young people have furigana on kanji they might not expect young people to know, but they also have a lot fewer kanji. I find it harder to understand books without the kanji to help me with the meanings and also to help me figure out where one word ends and the next one begins. It's hard to look up a word in the dictionary if you don't even know what it begins with. So I like HP for that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 13 of 706 27 August 2012 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I see you are getting a good start on Portuguese with DLI, kuji. I think I jumped in at volume 4, so the drills were more helpful to me at that point. You're right, they are boring but do serve a purpose, especially when you get to verb conjugations. Thanks for the tip on Marcelo D2!
Her are some samba radio links: Radio Samba SP List of Brazilian Samba Internet Radio 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 14 of 706 27 August 2012 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Kuji, what we usually have are radios that play MPB and which reserve part of their schedule to samba programs. MPB is not technically a genre, it has a lot of samba, bossa-nova and plain singers-songwriters with no specific genre.
For example, there are Rádio Inconfidência and Rádio Guarani. Rádio Inconfidência (FM 100,9 , not the AM) Rádio Guarani 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4528 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 15 of 706 27 August 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi Kuji! I hope you can continue working hard and improve your Japanese :)
Have you considered making your own readers? As in, picking a text on your computer, an ebook, article, whatever, and turning that into a reader? What I do for Chinese is, I use perapera Chinese (You have perapera Japanese right? If not, check it out it's awesome), and in perapera, there is a function that allows you to save words you come across (in Chinese or Japanese) into a wordlist that you can copy and paste into a word processor like microsoft word. I'm reading the little prince right now, and everytime I come across a word I can't read, I hover over it and press "S", and I keep doing this until I've added all unknown words into my word list. Then I print off both that page of the book, as well as my vocab list. The vocab list (for Japanese) shows you the English meaning, the hiragana and the Kanji btw. Then I just study from it as I would from a normal reader. Maybe doing this will allow you to tackle more interesting and difficult texts? Edited by ZombieKing on 27 August 2012 at 9:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 16 of 706 27 August 2012 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When I see a correction for one of my entries, I take a look at my own sentence, the corrected sentence and try to figure out what has been corrected why. Most of the time, I see why my sentence was wrong. I then take the time to formulate a bunch of sentences with this exact point - but not written. That would just be メンドクセー ;)
Look, this is me on Lang-8. I usually try to wrap up what shows I've been watching, sometimes describing the shows or how I used them for my learning. As this is somewhat "bigger", I do lyrics translations into Japanese in the meantime to not get too much distance from the site, and to correct a few entries myself, just for the 人間関係 aspect. This is pretty important I think. You want to somehow find some friends to exchange corrections with, as people who stick with you slowly get a feel for your level, your weaknesses, and people who like you are more inclined to explain their corrections or answer questions. If you scroll through some of my entries, you'll see lengthy talks, not always about the corrections - sometimes it's just chit-chat. I'm a socializer.. I guess that's a plus. Edited by atama warui on 27 August 2012 at 10:14pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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